What does CPaaS mean?
A CPaaS is a cloud-based platform that helps enrich company channels by using APIs to integrate company applications with communication services. This means that organizations can embed real-time features like voice, video and messaging to their own applications such as CRM tools. In addition, It can also be used to integrate communication features with popular applications such as Facebook Messenger for customers.
Real-time communications (RTC) has traditionally taken place in applications specifically built for these features, like when you use the native phone app to call customer service. CPaaS however allows you to add other interesting features to your enterprise such as video chat and messaging to your own business applications. Thus also allowing vendors to offer building blocks for companies that want to include communication into their own services.
Many companies today lean towards CPaaS due to the fact that suppliers offer the complete development foundation, which in essence means that you can avoid spending time and effort on building any integration or application of your own. You don’t need to own any of your own hardware, and can therefore deliver easy, fast and cost-efficient access to telephony and chat functions that a company needs in order to provide great service. And since CPaaS is built on cloud-based APIs, businesses no longer need to make costly investments in hardware or backend infrastructure that lack scalability and adaptability.
Trends to watch out for
1. Omnichannel experience
Omnichannel means that the customer is the primary focus and making sure that they have an equally great experience no matter what channel they choose to contact a business through. The omnichannel contact center greatly influenced the CPaaS market with WhatsApp and Facebook introducing business messaging API by partnering with CPaaS vendors. WhatsApp and Facebook have since then become an increasingly popular alternatives to traditional telephony for businesses due to low costs and easy implementation.
The Omnichannel experience is only set to expand more with Google attempting to replace SMS for carries with RCS protocol. This includes a richer text-message system which provides phonebook polling and can transmit in-call multimedia. And while SMS still plays in important role in business communication, it will become necessary for businesses to pay attention to other social communication channels.
2. Visual interface
The future of CPaaS is expected to have more support for visual interfaces and IDEs for application development. As accessible communication becomes a more standardised in business processes, and it also means that it’s important that it is easy accessible to a larger market. A step in that direction is visual interfaces and might later come to include additional great features such as widgets and more advanced applications.
As a result of this, technologies such as drag and drop functions have emerged in the CPaaS market to help fill the development gap in companies. Instead of having your own developers design a new interface, you can easily and quickly design and deploy applications to enhance productivity on your own.
3. Artificial intelligence
The future is data-driven, and CPaaS takes part in that. A lot of CPaaS technologies already include data and analytics features for data generated by internal and external communication. And this data will ultimately be used to further optimize performance and end-user experience.
4. Bots
The trend of omnichannel and AI are also linked to Bots. Bots have already made a huge impact on customer service experience and we not tend to talk more to bots than we do with individuals working in call centers. CPaaS vendors have partnered with third parties to offer bot features such as Amazon Alexa and Google Dialogflow. Contact centers will continue to move forward with automation and bots, and it will be more set as a norm in the omnichannel bundle. We do however still have some areas to cover including better interfaces and smarter bots for various channels.
Summary
CPaaS is evolving rapidly across all industries of which can reap the benefits of accessible communication channels. Companies however tend to be slow to the chase when adapting to new technology, and not embracing cloud-based platforms risks behind left behind in engaging with their customers. Businesses need to engage their customers on their terms, and CPaaS is the idea platform to accommodate an omnichannel approach.
customer loyalty is steadily decreasing due to how easy it is to change to another supplier or solution if it doesn’t tend to all needs and channels. To avoid loosing your customer base it’s important to tag along with new channels and functions on the market. CPaaS therefore means that when new customers adopt new channels to communicate with a company, the company can easily adjust and offer these. The benefit here lies in that companies can concentrate on what they do best and at the same time offer innovative communication solutions to their customers.
In comparison with technique that’s available today, it’s easy for companies to adopt CPaaS strategy with minimal investment. All types of companies can easily look through the API library and implement as many or as few channels as they want to their communication network. The only thing required is to decide what’s needed from the system
CpaaS with Dstny
We inherently recognize that just as technology steadily evolves, so do consumer demands. We can help you adapt with your consumers and help you integrate telephony with various different company applications such as your CRM, economy, business and errand system. Our integrations with telephony services can help enrich your communication channels with applications that end-users tend to use or you plan to implement. We offer among others integration with Microsoft Teams to get more out of your company telephony and apps.
To learn more about our integrations and how we can help you, contact us and one of our experienced advisors will gladly help you out.
To read more about what CPaaS means, read our glossary definition for more details.